Monday, October 5, 2015

Let's hear it for bleak optiminism!

I don't want to tell Donald Trump how to run his crazy, possibly not even for real campaign for president, but I'm not sure that a shrugging acceptance of the inevitability of a future full of mass-murder is necessarily the best route.

I say 'possibly not even for real' because I'm not convinced that he isn't just
up there to make the rest of the GOP 's field look less batty by comparison.
Standing next to Donald Trump adds like a +10 to your reasonablity role.

"I can't tell you that people say, oh, we're going to stop it. It doesn't work that way. This has taken place forever, from the beginning, and it's going-you go out a million years from now and you're going to have problems."

-Donald Trump, the grim over-

coiffured harbinger of doom

"Gor blimey, wot a pain in the arse..."

-Brit'ish pee-pol

Really? I'm not an historian or anything, and I'll agree that humans were being goddamn horrible to one another for ages before the first firearms, but gun-related mass shooting have not been taking place forever. For the first couple hundred years of guns, reloading was like a process. Soldiers would shoot at each other and then spend the next ten minutes stuffing powder and balls (what?) down their musket-holes. Fortunately, everyone back then was gentlemanly enough to wait for the other side to re-load, but the Revolutionary War must have been bo-ring (source: history).

As for the future, there's something bleakly optimistic about kicking the can a million years down the road. I mean, holy shit, a million years?

Won't somebody please think of the Morlocks?

"Out of my cold dead hands..."

-Jean-Luc Picard, President of

the National Phaser Association

First of all, when you think about it, that's a really long time in the lifespan of a species. Even longer when you consider that we're already facing climate change, pandemics and the possibility of a Trump presidency. Secondly, if we are around a million years from now, won't we have evolved or something? I'm not just talking extra fingers or throbbing telekinetic brains, but socially. I'd like to think we'll grow up eventually, that we'll outgrow whatever petty bullshit makes us think more guns makes us safer.

If a hundred years from now, or a thousand or a million we, as a species, are still arguing about
whether or not the second amendment was written with blasters and disruptors in mind, we've got bigger problems. But whatever, just because it's been a problem for a long time doesn't mean we shouldn't even bother trying to do something about it.

"People are always up our asses about curing things, butwhat's the point? Humans have been dying of diseases for ages."